No need to be an expert in History to know there wouldn't be any Israeli state without the "Holocaust". And who first officially 'reported' the "Holocaust"? The World Jewish Congress, a Zionist organization working for the creation of the Israeli state. How convenient...

The Riegner Report

(August 8, 1942)

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) representative in Geneva, Gerhard Riegner, obtained information from a German manufacturer, Eduard Schulte — who had connections in Hitler’s general headquarters — indicating that Hitler had decided to systematically annihilate all of European Jewry, and that gas was being used to attain this goal. After Riegner gathered further information about his source, he approached the American Consulate in Geneva with the report. He handed the deputy-consul a cable and asked him to forward it to Stephen Wise, an American Jewish leader. The cable contained the information that Riegner had obtained from Schulte concerning the plans for the murder of European Jewry:

"Received alarming report that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled Germany numbering 3 1/2 - 4 million should after deportation and concentration in east be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action reported planned for autumn; methods under discussion including prussic acid. We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable."

The sources of Schulte's information are not known and the cable contained some inaccuracies. For example, mass murder of Jews had been going on since June 1941, and gassings had been taking place since September 1941. The cable spoke of a future “blow” under “consideration,” whereas the extermination that had been begun was an ongoing process.

Gerhart Moritz Riegner (Berlin, September 12, 1911 – Geneva, December 3, 2001) was the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress from 1965 to 1983. On August 8, 1942, he sent the so-called Riegner Telegram through diplomatic channels to Stephen Samuel Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress.

The telegram was the first official communication about the planned Holocaust.

The Riegner Telegram was a message sent on 10 August 1942 by Gerhart Riegner, then Secretary of World Jewish Congress, Geneva. The cable "confirmed the seemingingly inconclusive information about the [German] mass murder that had reached the West previously." Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Mamillan Publishing Co., 1990. S. v. “Riegner Cable,” Yehuda Bauer.

After two more preparatory conferences in 1933 and 1934, the First Plenary Assembly, held in Geneva in August 1936, established the World Jewish Congress as a permanent and democratic organization. Elections for delegates to that assembly had to be according to democratic principles, namely secret, direct, and based on proportional representation. The 52 American delegates, for instance, were chosen at an Electoral Convention which met in Washington, DC, on 13/14 June 1936 and which was attended by 1,000 representatives from 99 communities in 32 US states.[28]

The World Jewish Congress's expressed goal was Jewish unity and the strengthening of Jewish political influence in order to assure the survival of the Jewish people, which involved the creation of a Jewish state.

WJC and the creation of the State of Israel

Although its principal purpose was to defend the rights of Jews in the Diaspora, the WJC always actively supported the aims of Zionism, i.e. creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine, was represented at the First Plenary Assembly of the WJC in 1936, which affirmed in a resolution "the determination of the Jewish people to live in peaceful cooperation with their Arab neighbors on the basis of mutual respect for the rights of each."[64]

In 1946, in a memorandum to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine drafted by WJC Political Secretary Alexander L. Easterman, the WJC declared that “the only hope of reviving the life and culture of the Jewish people lies in the establishment of a fully self-governing Jewish Homeland, recognised as such throughout the world; that is, a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”[65]

WJC officials lobbied UN member states in favor of the adoption of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947, which called for the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. On 15 May 1948, the day of Israel’s proclamation of independence, the WJC Executive pledged “world Jewry’s solidarity” with the fledgling Jewish state. In Montreux, Switzerland, delegates from 34 countries attended the Second Plenary Assembly of the World Jewish Congress, held from 27 June to 6 July 1948.

Like Roswell McClelland, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) representative in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner, was apparently a man who “could not believe, yet did believe” information on exterminations. He made many protestations to Allied governments on the basis of a report he allegedly obtained from an anti-Nazi German industrialist in the Summer of 1942.

In that report, Riegner was quoted recently as saying, were somber warnings that Hitler had prepared for the total physical annihilation of European Jews. Authorities in the U.S. and Britain were asked to believe that the industrialist (who owned factories employing 30,000 workers) had access to the highest counsels of the German government, and was invited to a secret meeting at which the Nazi extermination plan was laid out.

In the first of several messages to American and British diplomatic representatives in Switzerland, Riegner asked that the data be transmitted to their governments and to key Jewish leaders. As is now well known, the information was dismissed as fantasy by the foreign service establishments of both countries. A typical reaction was that these allegations were merely “the opinion of one Jew in Geneva.”[31] As Riegner himself told the Washington Post: “No one really believed it. Not even the Jews who knew it [?]… I counted 4 million Jews as dead.” (How they were counted is not indicated.) “My own World Jewish Congress office in New York – where I sent all my reports – published the figure of only 1.5 million.”[32]

While he has reportedly “struggled” long and hard with the reasons his industrialist’s – and by extension, others’ – reports were suspect, Riegner concludes that the human mind simply could not accept claims of such magnitude.

There are, of course, less metaphysical reasons why Riegner’s claims were viewed as little more than rumor. The most obvious is their unsubstantiated character. As Martin Gilbert made plain in his 1981 book Auschwitz and the Allies, Washington and London were “disinclined” to believe Riegner’s “fantastic” tales, in part because no others had been as strikingly grandiose. Although Riegner spoke of interrogating the mysterious industrialist (it was two full days before he believed the man’s accounts himself), authorities in the West remained dubious. Much of this attitude appears to have hinged on the phrase “at one blow exterminated,” found in Riegner’s first urgent telegram, of 8 August 1942.[33] To be sure, some officials, including the American Vice-Consul in Geneva, Howard Elting, considered the 30-year-old lawyer “a serious and balanced individual,” but inside the State Department skepticism prevailed.

Against Vice-Consul Elting’s view that Riegner would not have asked to see him had Riegner “lacked confidence in his informant,” must be weighed the questions of Elting’s colleagues about the messenger. Riegner was, in fact, an entirely unknown quantity either in Foggy Bottom or in Whitehall. When the Riegner correspondence was forwarded from Switzerland to London, the response of Richard Law, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was to ask: “What do we know of Mr. Riegner?”[34] After pouring over refugee files and consulting with British Zionists, the answer was: nothing. As Gilbert notes, “the Foreign Office drew a blank.”[35]

Owing to such official reservations the Riegner report was not made public. On 17 August the U.S. Minister in Bern, Leland Harrison, was told by Washington that the report also had not been delivered – as requested by Riegner – to World Jewish Congress President Rabbi Stephen Wise. The reason, according to U.S. documents quoted extensively in Gilbert’s book, was “the unsubstantiated nature of the information.”

The American Consul in Geneva, Paul Squire, bluntly echoed this language in communicating to Riegner a week later. Until “corroboratory information” on the extermination of the Jews was received, Squire told a frustrated Riegner, the State Department was “disinclined to deliver the message in question in view of the apparently unsubstantiated character in the information that forms its main theme.”

There was another reason for this disinclination. The report repeated some of the most gruesome atrocity canards of the First World War.[36] Some stories retained the discredited charges intact, others dropped certain elements and replaced them with ones which may have had a plausible basis. The result was an incomprehensible hash of fact and fancy.

Eleanor Roosevelt first understood the depth of the horror of the Holocaust in December, 1942 after reading the Riegner report in the newspaper. This report revealed that in Poland over two-thirds of the Jewish population had been massacred (nearly 3 million Polish Jews). On December 8, 1942 FDR met with Rabbi Stephen Wise, as well as Adolph Held of Jewish Labor Committee and Maurice Wertheimer of the American Jewish Congress. FDR agreed during the meeting to issue a public warning against war crimes and assured the group that “we shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment.”

Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was president of both the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, announced at a press conference in late November 1942 that, according to information confirmed by the State Department, the Germans had already killed two million European Jews as part of an "extermination campaign." In fact, the State Department had confirmed nothing of the kind. Two weeks later, its specialist for European Jewish affairs, R. Borden Reams, urged higher Department official's to try to persuade Wise "to call off, or at least to tone down, the present world-wide publicity campaign concerning 'mass murders' and particularly to ask Dr. Wise to avoid any implications that the State Department furnished him with official documentary proof of these stories."

The State Department issued a formal statement, which was made public on 4 September 1942, protesting the "brutal mass murders" of "hundreds of thousands" of Jews deported from Germany and other countries under German control "in accordance with the announced policy of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe." But as Wyman points out, the day before this statement was made public, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles privately assured Wise that in reality the deported Jews were not being killed. The "real purpose" of the deportation program, Welles said, was "to use Jews in connection with war work" in Germany, Poland and Russia.

And although President Roosevelt had issued a vaguely worded condemnation in July 1942 of the alleged German extermination of the Jews, he privately told his close Jewish confidant Felix Frankfurter in mid-September 1942 not to worry because the deported Jews were simply being employed in the Soviet frontier area. While Walter Laqueur and a few other Jewish historians have cited this revealing statement by Roosevelt, Wyman prefers to ignore it.